Tina Askanius - Cardiff University

genres and products. They hardly
represent a self-contained or stable
genre. Instead, they migrate, mutate,
replicate in a constant shuttle between
fictional and factual genres in a ‘cross
pollination of styles’ (Hill 2007).
Figure 3. Framing the news anchor as
croupier in the absurd theatre of casino
capitalism.
Another example of the critical and
playful remixing of content characteristic
of the political mash-up video is seen in
the Indymedia production ‘Pro Capitalists
gather for G20 in London April 1st’. In
this video, scraps of CNN, BBC, RT and
FOX news reports on the global financial
crisis are ‘jammed’ so as to ridicule and
subvert the statements of politicians,
bankers and news anchors.
Mixing these ‘disrupted’ news reports
with amateur recordings from anticapitalist
protests in London and footage
from a Casino, this hodgepodge of reedited
content frames the global
financial crisis as a product of ‘casino
capitalism’, the corruption of political
and economic world leaders, and the
inability/reluctance of mainstream
media to critically probe and expose
these matters to the public (see
appendix 15).
A particularly good example of videos
that work between performative and
realist strategies to attract the attention
of the viewer are mash-up videos, which
combine the features of the personal
vlogs with what we may loosely refer to
as the alternative news report. In
collapsing these two genres, such videos
for instance combine close-ups of ‘the
talking head’ typical of the video diary,
with eyewitness accounts or fragments
of mainstream media news material, to
create a new and personalised narrative
of the protest event. Some of these more
individualised modes of political
expression intrinsic to the video diary
tend to deflate into a politics of
narcissism in videos that seem to be is
more about boosting channel traffic and
achieving celebrity vlogger status than
about constructing a political argument
or engaging in political a debate.
The collapse of genres and styles
Second, the concept of mash-up also
bears meaning to the process of mixing
genres and stylistic forms. Political
mash-up videos draw upon a wide range
of different discourses, styles, and
narrative structures of different media
www.cf.ac.uk/JOMECjournal
Figure 4. Crossover between the intimate
video diary and the alternative news report.
We see these tensions being played out
in the video ‘Goodbye Alex’ in which a
vlogger pays tribute to the Greek
teenager, Alexandros Grigoropoulos,
killed by police in Athens in 2008 (see
appendix 16). On YouTube his death
spawned a surge of alterative news
11
@JOMECjournal